February 17 is the feast-day of Priest Eustace (Yevstafy) Sokolsky. He prayed to God, served at the same church for forty-two years, loved and pitied people, raised his children, cultivated a garden, but he did not conform to the Soviet Government. The priest’s fate is one of many, but it is a true example of faithfulness and heroism.
His birthplace, church and family
The Kaluga province. The village of Rozhdestvo (“Nativity”) on the Shanya River. The town of Medyn, the district’s administrative center, is five miles away. According to information from 1859–1873, there were five households in the village. One of them belonged to the deacon of the Church of the Nativity of Christ—Fr. Peter Sokolsky. The parish covered nineteen villages.
On February 20, 1874, a son, Eustace, was born in the Sokolsky family. He was baptized at the church where his father served. From an early age Eustace loved church services, singing, and the purity of the words of prayers. On growing up, Eustace Sokolsky went to study at the Kaluga Theological Seminary. In 1895, after graduating with a second degree, he was appointed teacher at the parish school of the Church of the Kazan Icon in the village of Gribovo. He worked at the school for only one year.
On November 14, 1896, Eustace Sokolsky married Olga Alexandrovna Volkhonskaya, who graduated from the Kaluga Diocesan College and was the daughter of Priest Alexander Volkhonsky, rector of the Church of the Theophany in the city of Kaluga. Ten days after the wedding Fr. Alexander passed away. His son Gregory became the new rector. From 1889 on he served as the rector of St. Nicholas Church in the village of Kamenskoye. On December 15, 1896, the twenty-two-year-old Eustace Sokolsky was ordained priest at the same church. From that day on over four decades of his life would be wholly devoted to the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in the village of Kamenskoye of the Zvenigorod district of the Moscow Province (formerly the Borovsk District of the Kaluga Province).
The Medyn district, the village of Rozhdestvo. A fragment of the map of 1863
In 1900, the priest’s house was built behind the fence of St. Nicholas Church, in which six daughters and the son of Fr. Eustace and his wife Olga were born. Then the deacon’s house was built, and a large garden was dug. The reader’s house was built closer to the Shanya River.
Fr. Eustace the rector
In the second half of the nineteenth century there were around 3,000 parishioners in the parish of St. Nicholas Church—these were residents of the village of Kamenskoye, two more villages and four hamlets. A priest, a deacon, a sexton and a sacristan served in the church. The parishioners loved the rector, Fr. Eustace Sokolsky, who was appointed in 1896, with all their hearts. He was really a good shepherd who cared for people, understood them and was compassionate to them. Thus, at St. Nicholas Church poor people did not have to pay for services of need, unlike in other churches. Batiushka gave great attention to the education of children, explaining to parents how important it was. And there were opportunities to study. In the village of Kamenskoye there was a zemstvo school, built in 1852 and located in a house next to the church, and in the villages of Klovo and Romanovo there were parish schools. In the early twentieth century they had 175 students.
Fr. Eustace’s great contribution was the creation of a church choir that sang antiphonally—in two kliroses, with eight singers in each.
However, the First World War and the October Revolution changed rural life. From November 1918 to July 1919 Fr. Eustace was mobilized and sent to the militia in the rear. But he returned and continued to serve at the church, realizing what times had come, as if foreseeing his destiny, which he shared with his teacher N.S. Protasov. In the 1920s, pioneer and Komsomol organizations were established in the village, and the anti-church propaganda and agitation to join a collective farm became more and more furious.
Arrests
The year 1927 went down in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church with many epoch-making events. These were the publication of the Declaration of Metropolitan Sergei (Stragorodsky), which is compared with 1917 for the whole of Russia, and the opening of the Theological Institute. The number of priests who were arrested, put on trial and charged was 1,676, twice as many as in 1926. Among them was Fr. Eustace Sokolsky, who was arrested on suspicion of counterrevolutionary agitation and put into Butyrka Prison. His agitation allegedly consisted of delivering anti-Soviet sermons and spreading a monarchist appeal among the peasants.
Priest Eustace Sokolsky. Moscow, Butyrka Prison, 1927 After three months the priest was released, as the suspicions were not supported by facts. Fr. Eustace returned to Kamenskoye and continued to serve at St. Nicholas Church. The bells rang no more, and the services were celebrated almost secretly. But the parish was preserved, and those whose lives had become especially difficult and hungry always found help there. In the early 1930s the village council confiscated the sexton’s house. In 1936 the bells were thrown down.
In 1938 the number of arrested clergy reached 13,478. In 1937 their number was horrifying and the largest in the history of the repressions of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church: 37,331. However, all statistics are subject to some doubt due to the lack of documents, repeated arrests, the closure of churches, etc., which increases the margin of error and the number of those who suffered for Christ. The data for 1938 is considered to be the most inaccurate. Anyway, 1937–1938 were the years of great terror, which was the millstone around Fr. Eustace’s neck as well. In addition, there was a special “plan” for arrests, which was zealously executed by the Naro-Fominsk directorate of the NKVD (the secret police agency). Those who had already been denounced or classified as “alien class elements” were arrested.
On January 27, 1938, the rector of the church was arrested. This time he was not charged with counter-revolutionary agitation, but with “vile slander against the Soviet Government”. For example, Fr. Eustace Sokolsky “spoke ill of collective farms” and in addition, back in 1903, he wrote a denunciation against a certain Zabaluyev-Kalmykov for singing “La Marseillaise” in the village tea shop, while drunk, which resulted in the latter’s exile.
At first, the investigation was conducted in Kamenskoye. In winter, the elderly priest was put into a cold barn, his outer clothes were taken away, and he was almost starved to death, becoming very sick. The teacher Pozdnyakov’s daughter would secretly sneak in to bring him food. However, he refused to sign the interrogation protocols, despite all the humiliations. Fr. Eustace confirmed only one fact: a conversation about obvious problems in the collective farm. The priest, who fell ill during interrogations and confinement in the cold barn, was taken away from the village on a sleigh in the snow. The whole village came out to see him off.
The priest was thrown into Taganka Prison in Moscow from where there was the only way out—to a common grave of the Butovo firing range. During interrogations in prison he pleaded not guilty. On February 11, the NKVD troika sentenced Fr. Eustace to execution by firing squad. The sentence was carried out the next day. The priest’s family left Kamenskoye, or it was taken away.
After the priest’s martyrdom
The Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Kamenskoye was closed after Fr. Eustace’s arrest and martyrdom. The parishioners were orphaned. But many of them did not lose faith in God, and so they travelled to the Church of St. Basil the Great in the village of Iklinskoye to have their children baptized. Hieromonk Ambrose (Ivanov) would travel from it to St. Nicholas Church to celebrate funeral services and memorial services. But this church was closed in 1940, damaged during combat in 1941 and blown up in 1960.
St. Basil the Great’s Church in the village of Iklinskoye, photo from the German military archive. Sobory.ru
The last churchwarden of St. Nicholas Church was Matrona Semyonovna Lapshina, whose daughter, Praskovya, lived to see the glorious time of the restoration of St. Nicholas Church and after her death the funeral for her was performed in it.
After World War II (1941–1945 in the USSR) the ancient church, the pride of Russia, was used for household needs, which is sad to write about. It slowly began to collapse and fell into disrepair, but between 1958 and 1963 work on its conservation and restoration was carried out. In the following years, the church cemetery was destroyed. Nevertheless, the church received a new status—of an architectural monument of national significance, but nevertheless it was left derelict and was gradually turning into ruins.
Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Kamenskoye, 1955. Kamenskoenf.cerkov.ru
St. Nicholas Church in the village of Kamenskoye miraculously survived many hardships. And it still welcomes its parishioners who remember Fr. Eustace, who devoted forty-two years of his life to serving in it. Such devotion to the same church seemed to have been passed down to him from his father, Deacon Peter Sokolsky, who in 1906 was awarded the Order of St. Anna (the third degree) for fifty years of service.
In 1990, St. Nicholas Church was returned to the faithful, but it was not until April 1999 that the first prayer service with the Blessing of the Waters was celebrated. Regular services resumed, which initially were held outside the church. In the same year, the floor was laid in the church, a solea was constructed, a temporary iconostasis was put up, and the church area was enclosed by a fence.
In 2000 the western porch was added to the church, and in 2001 restoration work was completed, during which an iconostasis appeared in it. The church was consecrated again. It is noteworthy that among the icons there is an old one that a family of parishioners had managed to preserve. A school for children opened, and charity work is being carried out as before.
St. Nicholas Church (left) and the small church of the New Hieromartyr Eustace (right)
In memory of the New Hieromartyr Eustace a small church was built next to St. Nicholas Church in 2006–2009. This is a church in the Pskov style, single-domed with a multi-span belfry. It was built on the edge of the old cemetery, beside the graves of soldiers who fell during World War II. The foundation stone of St. Eustace’s Church was laid in November 2005—on the 625th anniversary of the Battle of Kulikovo and the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Victory. Its belfry has six bells. On Trinity Sunday 2006 crosses were installed on the church.
At the Jubilee Council of Bishops in 2000 Priest Eustace Sokolsky was canonized with other New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
